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Friends, Romans, it’s time to play

14 Mar 2014

​Bell Shakespeare’s Mind’s Eye and Pop Up Playground are collaborating in the creation of a new immersive theatre performance, #TrueRomansAll, from this month, with three test performances scheduled for mid-October.

Mind’s Eye is Bell Shakespeare’s creative development arm, which seeks out artists and companies in the small to medium sector to collaboratively develop work that takes its inspiration from Shakespeare and the classics.

The project will come with a downloaded game app, inspired by Shakespeare’sJulius Caesar.

#TrueRomansAll will be directed by Robert Reid, a freelance playwright, game designer and academic, as well as being Pop Up Playground’s artistic director.

Pop Up Playground is a company that makes ‘immersive reactive situation’—that is, it plays games and tells stories with goals such as to stimulate engagement, build relationships and solve problems.

Play with the Valkyries

Robert Reid, Sayraphim Lothian, Ben McKenzie and their gorgeous game makers realised that we weren’t having as much fun as we should be and have been popping up all over the city with games for everyone.

A Pop Up Playground event is guaranteed to have you feeling happier than when you arrived.

This Is a Door Festival 2013

Melbournians can embrace their inner child during This Is a Door, a month-long festival of games and participatory performance launching on Halloween. Melbourne’s new games designers, in league with a handful of inventive companies, have crafted up four weeks of play to suit all tastes.

Maybe you’ll try The Curse, a 30-minute puzzle/chase game designed by Pop Up Playground (PUP) (warning: if you have a phobia of clowns, skip it). The PUP team are also hosting a weekend of games including Belgian Roulette, Rainbow Running, Invisible Labyrinth and Impossible Bookclub — disclaimer: we have no idea what any of those games are but they sound great. Read More »

Pop Up Playground: This Is A Door

Pop Up Playground had its first public gig in September 2011. Since then, the company has continued to grow with the new and creative games they have been making and bringing out the inner child in people and they are back this month with their event This Is A Door.

“This Is A Door is where we play a variety of 2 minute to 20 minute games for two hours. It is a festival of new games that we have created,” Artistic Director Robert Reid tells me. “The whole festival this year has been about trying to get other companies exposure so people know that this sort of stuff is happening.” Read More »

Pop Up Playground: This Is A Door

Pop Up Playground had its first public gig in September 2011. Since then, the company has continued to grow with the new and creative games they have been making and bringing out the inner child in people and they are back this month with their event This Is A Door.

“This Is A Door is where we play a variety of 2 minute to 20 minute games for two hours. It is a festival of new games that we have created,” Artistic Director Robert Reid tells me. “The whole festival this year has been about trying to get other companies exposure so people know that this sort of stuff is happening.”

This Is A Door opened up with The Curse and was performed at Luna Park on Halloween night. Players scoured the park to find three fortune tellers to help break the curse put upon them whilst being cautious of three clowns lurking nearby. It was the first event I had participated in and I loved the excitement of being a child again and running around in a panic as the time counted down to when I would be cursed forever.

“I like that when we do games like The Curse, we create an environment where there is a story told but you determine the type of story you experience. The decisions that people make in the moment tell these great stories and you get people sacrificing themselves for each other or stabbing each other in the back.”Robert says.

If a day of games doesn’t tickle your fancy, there are lots of other things planned by the team at Pop Up Playground. “We’ve got a couple of playful street art projects going on with Guerrilla Poets Opening Doors and I See Magical Creatures where we take old children’s toys, bundle them up and then paint them with bright colours and glitter and then hide them throughout the city. There is also MechCombat, which is an experimental live gaming experience involving robots.”Robert tells me.

It’s no secret that the older we get, the more we forget about this sense of play and fun. We get concerned with “adult” life and problems that simply enjoying things can be difficult. “Play is good for us and it is useful to us. There are social benefits and learning how to be a person”, Robert explains. “There is a physical aspect to games but they also keep your brain active and force you to be innovative and think strategically.”

This immersive theatre/play experience is rapidly growing in Melbourne. More and more people don’t want to just “sit and watch” anymore so if you haven’t experiences this yet, then make sure to check out This Is A Door during the month of November.

In 2009 the Battersea Arts Centre in London hosted A Small Town Anywhere, a new work by UK-based company Coney. In it around 30 participants took on the role of villagers in a small country town. Each concealed a terrible secret and likewise had a mortal enemy among the other villagers.

A Small Town Anywhere condensed an entire week of drama into the space of roughly two hours; days and nights passed with subtle shifts in lighting; paper snow fell at one point and gossip, treachery and paranoia threatened to tear the little community apart.

Tom Bowtell and Tassos Stevens, two of the company’s co-directors, describe Coney as mixing “live and digital art forms to create immersive stories and play.” Their work, as well as the work of other groups such as Hide and Seek, Slingshot, Splash and Ripple and The Larks, is part of an emerging practice that, for ease of reference, I’ll call New Games. Their work varies widely encompassing Tiny Games, a series of 99 “easy to play” site-specific games designed for the streets of London by Hide and Seek, and 2.8 Hours Later, a city-wide zombie chase game, by Slingshot. Read More »

Playing in Public With Pop Up Playground

Playing with my kids is probably the finest thing I get to do with my life. From boardgames to roleplaying through to wrestling the youngest on the bed and wandering through Minecraft servers with the older boys. I love to play (what GeekDad doesn’t?). Importantly, GeekDads know that play need not be something that stops at childhood. In Melbourne, Australia, there is an organization interested in helping all adults re-engage with play. Read More »

Whether it’s being part of a crowd rooting for a football team, an audience laughing in unison at a comedian’s jokes, or maybe flashmobbing a train station, there’s something special about communal experience. Pop Up Playground’s Fresh Air Festival is all about bringing strangers together through fun, games, and complicity.

A series of activities will take place around Federation Square this weekend, all based around the theme of interaction and improvisation. Some are as simple as a tent where an artwork that has been left for a lucky stranger — on the condition that they make something for the next person to come along and discover. Then there are enormous, communal games that might have you carrying out secret missions, putting out fires, or even escaping a curse.

Fresh Air Fest is an anarchic, hilarious, and inclusive festival of pervasive games — you’re guaranteed to leave with a new friend.

This is a DoorJuly 30, 2012

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Pop Up PlaygroundTheatreworks, season ended

AROUND the turn of the millennium, computer games killed a thriving scene of face-to-face social gaming. We used to have conventions that hosted everything from live role-playing to elaborate strategy; much of that has now migrated online.

Fashion is cyclical, though, and the international games carnival This is a Door at Theatreworks this past weekend was an opportunity for nostalgia as well as an innovative look at new possibilities for interactive play. It wasn’t theatre. It wasn’t even art. But it was spirited, anarchic fun. Read More »